Tuesday, December 02, 2008

The cost of the single payment scheme

Over the past few years the "Single Payment Scheme" for famrers out of the hellish EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been famed for fiasco.

Last week, DEFRA confirmed to Parliament however how much it cost just to administer the system over the past three years which ammounted to a grand total of £298.4 million. Crucially, and this is the bit that leapt out for me in Hansard were the words,

These costs exclude the investment in new systems and improvement projects.

So, that figure is just the operating cost of making sure people receive their money, approximately £99 million a year. The "investment in new systems" that the figure does not include would be the £122 million spent on the, not-on-time, over-budget, computer system to manage the payments of the subsidies that are worth £1,515 million per year.